1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates generally to drivers of computer operating systems and, more specifically, to replacement of an inbox driver of an operating system with a third party driver.
2. Background Information
An external device may be connected to a computer via a port, such as an input/output (I/O) port of a host controller and, in response, one or more drivers, i.e., software programs or processes executing on the computer, may be provided to allow the device to interact with other processes executing on the computer. Examples of a driver may include a bus driver, a function driver and, optionally, a bus filter driver. Broadly stated, the bus driver may be provided to control operation of (i.e., “service”) a bus, such as the host controller, as well as to detect and report characteristics of the external device connected to the port of the controller. The function driver may be provided to service the external device, whereas the bus filter driver may be provided to support the external device through enhanced features or functionality.
In addition, the driver may be an inbox driver that is embedded, i.e., previously installed, within an operating system of the computer. An example of an inbox driver may be an inbox class function driver that is provided to service a certain class of devices, e.g., a mass storage class that includes external storage devices, such as thumb drives and/or hard disk drives. Often, there may be a need to replace the inbox (class) function driver with a third party function driver that, e.g., may have higher performance than the inbox driver.
However, many operating systems currently do not have a mechanism or procedure that is permanent and safe to perform such driver replacement. Typically when an attempt is made to replace an inbox function driver with a third party function driver, the operating system may issue a warning that the attempted driver replacement may not be optimally or even suitably compatible with the external device and/or operating system because, e.g., the replacement driver does not have a preferred matching or ranking compared to that of the inbox driver. Thus, there is a need to ensure device and/or operating system compatibility and performance with a replacement driver of a computer.